National Inventors' Day: Malachi Duncan

In honour of National Inventors’ Day I had the chance to interview an entrepreneur, Epic Games’ Technical Artist and good friend in Malachi Duncan. We covered all issues – diversity, creativity, motivation, etc. and the full, video interview can be found here.

This snippet focuses on how we can get more black people into the Special Effects’ Industry. My question was “is there much diversity in your arena? And if not, what kind of advice would you give to someone that's looking to get in?

His answer…

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Yeah. I would say that there isn't a crazy amount of diversity in my industry at the moment.

I think that it is something that there are initiatives to try to fix and change. I feel that that when there is diversity, there isn't necessarily a lot of black diversity as the diversity often comes from the Middle East, or the far parts of Asia. 

It is a shame, because there is, there is such a big black population in the UK and I feel that there is a trap where black people go into banking, finance and law because they think "oh, if I if I learn about money, then people give you money" which isn't necessarily always the case.

To other black people and people of ethnic minority generally. I would say that if you want to try to get into the space, then you don't actually need to do a university degree. Like nobody has ever asked me for my university degree. 

Nobody has nobody have questioned the grades I've got.

It's all about your portfolio. It's very much like a, "what have you done for me lately?" industry.

So you can learn pretty much most of what I know on YouTube. 

In fact, everything I learned that got me my first job, I learned on YouTube.

I didn't actually learn anything that I learned in my degree. It was all kind of self-study.

So, yeah, if you create a good enough portfolio and you blast that out to as many studios as you can,  then somebody will, somebody will hire you, and I think it's just taking that first step of knowing that that's what you want to do.

Don't be a runner at a studio because you'll spend a year or two just getting coffee.

I would say you know, if you're a student right now, get a job at Tesco and use that as motivation to work on some awesome personal projects in the evening. And then yeah, send out some CVs because they are hiring.

The creative space is a very unique thing where it is definitely what is your skillset and are you good at your job?

There isn't necessarily like a good old boys’ club.

If you’re bad at your job, you're not gonna get in and if you're good at your job, you can.

We know what good recruitment looks like, our partners know what inclusive looks like. Check out our partners, if you want to increase diversity in tech and work with the experts who know how.

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